Final Post: The academic career and the "don't-know" mind

Many of my peers are using their final blog post as a platform to receive feedback on their upcoming drafts. It is the end of the semester, and I am empty--emotionally, physically, and mentally drained. My post will be filled with the words of others, woven together with my own exasperated, fearful questions about the academic job market. I think I'll start with a poem. Poems are nice.

Fear, by Stephen Dobyns

His life frightened him. The sun in the sky,
the man next door--they all frightened him.
Fear became a brown dog that followed him home.
Instead of driving it away, he became its friend.
The brown dog named fear followed him everywhere.
When he looked in the mirror, he saw it under
his reflection. When he talked to strangers,
he heard it growl in their voices. He had a wife:
fear chased her away. He had several friends:
fear drove them from his home. The dog fear
fed upon his heart. He was too frightened
to die, too frightened to leave the house.
Fear gnawed a cave in his chest where it
shivered and whined in the night. Wherever
he went, the dog found him, until he became
no more than a bone in its mouth, until fear
fixed its collar around his throat, fixed
its leash to the collar. The dog named fear
became the only creature he could count on.
He learned to fetch the sticks it threw for him,
eat at the dish fear filled for him. See him
on the street, seemingly lost, nose pressed
against the heel of fear. See him in his backyard,
barking at the moon. It is his own face he
finds there, hopeless and afraid, and he leaps at it,
over and over, biting and rending the night air.

In Zen, there are a great number of meditations, contemplations, and teachings about fear and fearlessness. I've recently returned to them, hoping to find courage enough to take heart and reclaim my bravery from the little brown dog called fear. For better or worse, I've picked up a new Zen book by Chögyam Trungpa, an extremely influential Buddhist teacher. He's renowned for his teachings on fearlessness, part of which I'll quote here:

That is to say, we have a fear of facing ourselves. Experiencing the innermost core of their existence is embarrassing to a lot of people. Many people try to find a spiritual path where they do not have to face themselves but where they can still liberate themselves--liberate themselves from themselves, in fact. In truth, that is impossible. We cannot do that. We have to be honest with ourselves. We have to see our gut, our real shit, our most undesirable parts. We have to see that. That is the foundation of warriorship and the basis of conquering fear. We have to face our fear; we have to look at it, study it, work with it, and practice meditation with it. (Trungpa, Smile at Fear: Awakening the True Heart of Bravery)

And that's just the problem with grad students in the humanities. We're afraid. We're too afraid to ask. We're too afraid to study the catatonic neurosis we're caught up in, too afraid of the answers we'll find. We just keep forging on, believing, hoping, that everything will turn out okay. In reality, I wonder if we're only doing just that, moving forward like lobotomized masses delusional of an okay future. I wonder not if, but how many of us, will get that final degree, the final pin in our coffin, and suddenly find that we've somehow cheapened ourselves somewhere along the way, being over-qualified to be a line cook or clerk but not worthy enough to earn anything more than the part-time wages of the freshmen we teach.

According to some accounts, the door into academia bears the words "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here," hand-carved by the destitute fingernails of adjuncts who have exposed the cheap wood-filler underneath the richly-stained cherry wood veneer. I am wary of trusting the sensationalism of these kinds of claims; but, at the same time, I am wary of trusting the words of professors, many of whom might not have jobs if it weren't for the enrollment of graduate students (or, for that matter, if that enrollment suddenly drops off because of an endemic of panic caused by their warnings).

There it is, our real shit. I think this is an appropriate place for words that bring hope:

When you are frightened by something, you have to relate with fear, explore why you are frightened, and develop some sense of conviction. You can actually look at fear. Then fear ceases to be the dominant situation that is going to defeat you. Fear can be conquered. You can be free from fear, if you realize that fear is not the ogre. You can step on fear, and therefore you can attain what is known as fearlessness. But that requires that, when you see fear, you smile. (Chögyam Trungpa, Great Eastern Sun)

Yet, here it is at the end of the semester, and I'm too exhausted and empty to give much of a smile. As I've passed through the halls the last few weeks, I've seen most of us pass by with our noses pressed against the heel of fear, perpetually urged along by its collar that we wear. It's important to take great care to remind ourselves that it's okay to take time for ourselves. It's okay to smile. Smiling is necessary, especially in the face of fear. The night before last, I literally stayed up all night because I had somehow forgotten that it's okay to take the time to sleep. As for the rest, I will meditate on my fear and, while I await answers to these questions, continue to practice this infuriating koan (a meditative paradox that is unsolvable by discursive means):

Breathing in, what is it?
Breathing out, I don't know.

Week 12: Giving opportunities for rebellion in the classroom

This post draws from the idea of "underlife" from Robert Brook's "Underlife and Writing Instruction." As the title implies, I'll be exploring the need to incorporate opportunities in low-stakes assignments for students to resist or rebel against the role of "student" that so often threatens to strip them of their individual identities and voices.

This concept of "underlife," the life or personality that underlies the masks I wear for student, tutor, teacher, professional, friend, son, or lover, is important to acknowledge in the classroom. Students aren't blank slates. They aren't empty vessels waiting to be filled. Paulo Freire calls this model of pedagogy the "banking model of education." It effectively others and ostracizes students who do not or will not conform to the model being forced upon them. This stifles learning, creativity, and the possibility of creating new knowledge or applying knowledge in new ways. It stifles innovation and promotes stagnation.




Others have described it as an education system meant to mass-produce quantities of "productive citizens" that force students into the same, generic mold. Some students may feel like the education system is a soul-sucking assembly line akin to Aldous Huxley's 900 meter-long assembly line that ripened embryos into major instruments of social stability.

From Nick Sousanis's Unflattening

In social epistimic terms, each student is a network of history, culture, decisions, discussions, and experiences. In expressivist terms, each student is a unique individual who is irreplaceable and nonreplicable. It's important to acknowledge students as the human beings they are in the classroom, and it's also important, in my opinion, to give students opportunities to rebel against this feeling of dehumanization.

The triangle student is burning his grey-square, academic mask in an angsty refusal to conform to the identity of an academic.

Give students the opportunity in low-stakes assignments to express themselves in creative ways that reflect who they are and what they value. I suggest considering these assignments as a participation grade because, otherwise, we as an evaluative authority will be overstepping our bounds and placing a value judgment on that student's value system. In Brooke's words:

The point is not to disrupt the functioning of the classroom, but to provide the other participants in the classroom with a sense that one has other things to do, other interests, that one is a much richer personality than can be shown in this context. All these activities, in short, allow the student to take a stance towards her participation in the classroom, and show that, while she can succeed in this situation, her self is not swallowed up by it. The interesting parts of herself, she seems to say, are being held in reserve. 

This tension between students' underlife and their role as student can be detrimental if that dam bursts during final essays or projects. Providing students with safe opportunities to express this tension in low-stakes assignments allows the instructor to acknowledge this tension and to help create a more accepting and nonjudgmental learning environment in which students feel more able to express these concerns. Depending on the instructor's response, an instructor might teach students that these reactions and feelings are valid; and, in doing so, establishes himself or herself as an ally to help students learn how to work through those learning barriers in a way that allows them to retain a sense of self while still productively engaging in classes that impose that generic student mold.

I know that last bit may sound idealistic, but I feel that it's important to create a learning environment that doesn't "other" students or silence the voices of students who do not conform. We need that diversity. We need to learn how to exist alongside those who are different. We need to learn how to accept others and to value other's experiences and beliefs as equal to our own, even if those values are in direct contradiction to our own.

Week 11: Reflect on your progress towards one of the class learning objectives

To begin with, here is a list of the course learning objectives (source: richrice.com/5060):

Learning Objectives
The objective of the humanities in general is to expand knowledge of the human condition and human cultures, especially in relation to behaviors, ideas, and values expressed in works of human imagination and thought. Through study in disciplines and subjects such as composition and rhetoric, students engage in critical analysis and develop an appreciation of the humanities as fundamental to the health and survival of society. Upon completion of this course, students will be able to demonstrate thinking and skills related to:
• Audience awareness. Students will analyze audience and purpose in rhetorical situations and make appropriate choices. Measurement: observation and analysis of artifacts produced, including active participation in classroom discussion and blogs.
• Critical thinking. Students will become more conscious of their processes for planning, drafting, revising, and editing of writing. Students will take an active role in summarizing, synthesizing, and presenting course content. Measurement: completion of informal and formal writing assignments at a quality level.
• Diversity and multiculturalism. Students will generate the type and amount of information required by a given rhetorical situation. Measurement: active participation in classroom discussion and blogs.
• Grammatical information presentation. Students will arrange material to elicit the intended audience's response achieve an effective tone and voice for a given rhetorical situation. Measurement: successful completion of an individual presentation.
• Stylistic information presentation. Make stylistic choices appropriate for a given rhetorical situation. Measurement: successfully create and report on applications of core composition concepts through collaboration.
• Communication skills. Understand how to present a proposal orally, using appropriate visuals. Measurement: successfully create, manage, produce, and report on artifacts through collaboration, including active participation in classroom discussion and blogs.

I would like to reflect on my progress towards critical thinking and how that relates to my desire to teach. I know this list is generated from a pool of university/departmental learning objectives, so they're written to be applicable to a wide range of disparate courses. In the context of this course, the "critical thinking" learning objective might be better worded as "critical engagement." This course serves as a foundational course that should prepare us with the requisite knowledge to competently and productively engage in ongoing discussions among other composition specialists.

I have learned a lot of new things about composition studies. I'm at the point in this semester where I keep my head down, hyper-focused on completing projects and seminar papers, but I have already had a few moments where I surprised myself by how much I've actually learned. A friend, who teaches English in France, was kind enough to accept a late night voice call to help me talk through my ideas about one of my projects; and, because she had earned the equivalent of an MA in English from a French university, I had assumed that we had a shared knowledge about composition studies. I brought up my ideas of what I could do with multimodal composition, expressivism, and postprocess pedagogy for my project, and for several minutes, there was only the sounds of us slaying hordes of demons in Diablo 3. I asked if my idea was just that bad, and she finally admitted, "Yeah, you lost me like ten minutes ago. I have no idea what any of that theory stuff actually means." So, on the spot, I was able to explain all of it well enough for her to understand what I was talking about.

I know anecdotes are a terrible source of credible evidence (I can't count how many times I've pasted that cookie-cutter comment into students' drafts), but I was very pleased that I was able to explain these theories clearly enough for someone else to understand them. The cynic in me knew all along that my explanations were horribly oversimplified and incomplete, so I also recognize that I have a long road ahead of me to get where I want to go. But still, success.

Week 10: How class material this week relates to my present/future workplace

Well, I guess I have to fess up and admit that I haven't done the syllabus project. So, in lieu of that prompt, I guess I'll briefly discuss how this week's readings--about how we should address common errors in composition--relates to my future workplace. I'm still leaning towards staying in academia, though I must admit that the instability of the job market, and the field in general, still make me feel like I need to have my bags packed, ready to go at a moment's notice after I get my MA.

I really, really like Shaughnessy's "Introduction to Errors and Expectations.- A Guide for the Teacher of Basic Writing." I have strong convictions to help students, whose primary intelligence is not written language, learn how to compose effectively. Furthermore, I really want to be able to teach my students how to bring their unique ways of knowing and making meaning into composition. I think Shaughnessy's argument is a great start towards that. Rather than immediately placing a negative value judgment on an error--bear with me here--we should get curious about it.

Here's how the process has worked in my own grading:

1. See an error.
2. Mark an error.
3. (Optional) Sink head into hands whilst trying to compose formative commentary.
4. Write summative commentary to explain the error and formative commentary to help guide revision.
5. Notice that formative commentary, depending on the students' personality and level of composition trauma, reads like either "fix it." or "FIX IT, OR FOREVER BE BANISHED FROM MY SIGHT AND FORFEIT THE CHANCE TO INTEGRATE INTO SOCIETY AS A SUCCESSFUL INDIVIDUAL!!!"

This idea of a universal error has changed the way that I approach grammatical and stylistic errors in my grading. Before, I felt like my students deserved 110% of the knowledge that I could impart to them that would improve their writing. Don't get me wrong, I still do, but as much as I want to help, that's too much. Students don't read kindness and gentleness in my suggestions; they only see a hellfire-and-brimstone Writing Warlock gone mad, flinging hordes of fiery thunderbolts of red ink and mockery that blot out the blue skies and sunshine of an otherwise lovely afternoon. Let's face it, that's a terrifying experience, even for qualified experts ("revise and resubmit"is all that need be said). Students don't like being wrong. They hate feeling incompetent or unworthy (we all do). For some, it's humiliating and directly challenges and contradicts their self-identity as a capable individual. It can cripple their ability to learn, their ability to grow. If they knew how to see or how to fix these errors, they wouldn't make them in the first place. 

As momentarily cathartic as being a mad Writing Warlock can be, I have started to take a different approach, and I like it much more. Even though I can't engage with my students, I'm sure they do too. I mark a few instances of recurring errors, maybe two or three at the most, and that allows me to focus my commentary on teaching argumentation and the learning objectives of that assignment. I then address those problems briefly in a final comment that explains them in more details and provides resources to learn how to avoid those errors altogether. Unfortunately, our grading system leaves no way for me to get feedback from the student, so I'm unable to engage in a dialogue with the student to satisfy my curiosity about why that error in particular seems to be his or her Achilles's heel. 

I miss that personal contact, so very much. It feels like all I can do is mail each student a pack of generic-brand Band-aids and hope that the problem is something a Band-aid can fix. I know this is just because I'm in Tech Comm, but I also worry that, figuratively speaking, my students can understand the directions on how to apply that Band-aid. I don't mean that as an insult to their intelligence. I mean that in the sense that, try as I might, the language I speak is very different from theirs. If I got a strange, alien device that would supposedly fix me right up, I wouldn't know how to read the directions either, and that would make me unreasonably fired up (again, probably in part because I'm in Tech Comm). 

Week 9: List 5 key terms from the course that you still don't know how to define

Here are my five key terms, as well as my attempt to define them more accurately:

• Authority: The power of one who writes (read: authors) or creates the truth that others accept as being truth
• Collaboration: The act of individuals working together as a community to achieve a common or socially-constructed goal
• Composing Processes: The various methods through which writers can compose a text. Implies a post-process and multimodal approach to writing.
• Composing: The general act of creating a text. Implies that both writing and texts are multimodal in nature and include more than just written language
• Dialectic vs. Rhetoric: Dialectic engages both speaker and listener in a reciprocal dialogue, whereas rhetoric predicts the response of an imagined audience

Trying to define authority is hard because it's such a complex concept that includes institutionalized views and power relations. It remindes me of the way United States Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart ultimately defined the threshold for pornographic obscenity in Jacobellis v. Ohio: "I know it when I see it."

Also of import, I'm not satisfied with my definition of Dialectic vs. Rhetoric. I feel like I'm oversimplifying or shortchanging rhetoric, but it seems like the most significant difference is that dialectic engages all participants in a dialogue, whereas rhetoric seems to largely function one way, from speaker, to the mental simulation of the audience (imagined audience), then to delivery. It doesn't seem to engage speaker and listener in a sustained, equal, and reciprocal way like dialectic does.

Week 8: Discuss an assignment that uses collaboration and technology

Until the last few semesters of my graduate studies, I had never been very interested in collaborative assignments. This semester, however, I've started to become very interested in collaborative writing. I'm not super familiar with designing collaborative assignments (good ones, anyway), so my description will be short and probably underdeveloped. Any feedback, references, or suggested readings would be much appreciated.

During my undergraduate creative writing workshops, we experimented with various community writing activities, such as the exquisite corpse game. Once, we even collaboratively developed character cards, where we would come up with a character name, then pass the cards to the next person, who would list a few defining physical characteristics, then the cards would get passed along again for the next set of details. By the end of it, we all twenty-something characters to write about, all of whom were characters that none of us could have created alone. We swapped cards a few more times to randomize who had which card, and our assignment was to write a flash fiction piece about the character who was on our card. Mine was a saucy, southern, bounty-hunter type, and when I looked at my card, I could see him there, sprawled out disrespectfully on a set of steps, smoking a cigar, and meeting my gaze with a steady look that made known his impatience to get the show on the road already.

My assignment draws from this experience, but instead of developing character cards, I would have students work in small groups to collaboratively write a short piece of flash fiction in groups. I would also ask them to illustrate their story using whatever method or technology they agreed upon (that would be reasonable for the scope of the assignment, of course). I would let students decide whether they wanted to each write sections of the story, or if they wanted to collaboratively agree upon a plot and have just one or two group members write the text version of the story. Likewise, they could all contribute to the illustration, or they could all discuss how they wanted certain characters or scenes to be portrayed and have one or two group members compose those illustrations. However, I would require all group members to make some kind of contribution to both the textual and the visual versions of the narrative, and I would give them plenty of class time to work in their groups, which would help me make sure that everyone is contributing ideas and no one gets left out.

My primary objectives with this assignment would be to encourage a post-process approach to both writing and technology and to engage students with the differences that medium can impose on the same narrative. I would also have students reflect on how their group's social interactions influenced and directed the narrative. My hope is that this would allow students to begin to see that all writing is situated in a social and cultural context.

Week 7: The Composition Classroom as an Act of Freedom and Presence

Foreword: I've been thinking on this topic since one of the first courses I took in graduate school. I was inspired and encouraged (read: en-couraged, as in bravery) to write this by Brandy's blog post about her response to the culture of fear that has permeated our classrooms and homes in the wake of the many recent school shootings. Here's a link to that blog post. Also, I apologize for the quality of the images in this post. It was the best I could do this late at night.

The Composition Classroom as an Act of Freedom and Presence

If you have a sharp eye for reading, as I'm sure my fellow word nerds do, then you may have noticed that, in the title, I have attempted to turned the composition classroom, a noun, into an action. The word "freedom" is probably familiar to certain camps of compositionists, but "presence" (used interchangeably with "mindfulness" in this post) is probably an unfamiliar practice in composition studies. Yet, it is one that, in the midst of our fast-paced and escapist culture, I argue is desperately needed in the composition classroom.

Mindfulness is a deceptively deep practice that comes from the Zen tradition. Simply put, it is the practice of fully inhabiting the experience of the present moment. Being present means not being pushed or pulled by our fears, stresses, or the millions of obligations we seem to face every day. When practicing mindfulness, one should remain aware of one's physical state, as well as one's mental and emotional state. This kind of awareness can be built up by focusing on doing one thing at a time, paying close attention to detail and not getting in any hurry. Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh describes mindfulness as applied to the seemingly trivial act of washing the dishes:

"While washing the dishes one should only be washing the dishes, which means that while washing the dishes one should be completely aware of the fact that one is washing the dishes. At first glance, that might seem a little silly: why put so much stress on a simple thing? But that's precisely the point. The fact that I am standing there and washing these bowls is a following my breath, conscious of my presence, and conscious of my thoughts and actions. There's no way I can be tossed around mindlessly like a bottle slapped here and there on the waves." (Hanh, Peace is Every Step 4-5)

So, what does this have to do with the composition classroom?

Students often come into our classrooms overworked, weary, or confused; and, if we habitually teach on autopilot, we may not be able to tell the difference between overworked or overtired students and those that are simply disengaged. By constantly remaining aware of our actions as educators, we may be able to better connect with the needs of our students. 

Students will likely come into our classrooms not knowing how to deeply reflect either on themselves or their actions. Drawing or freewriting can serve as powerful focusing activities if done in the spirit of mindfulness. An in-class activity that I have done in the past (as a student) asked us to slowly and carefully fill up a page of cardstock with the word "fear." We were given about ten minutes; and, during that time, we were also asked to reflect on our deepest fears about starting graduate school (we were first-semester grad students at the time). This assignment could easily be tweaked to have students explore their fears or frustrations with writing. Here's an image of mine after it was all finished:

When we were about halfway through filling up the page, we were asked to flip the paper over and freewrite about that fear with no fear of judgment or that writing to ever be read by anyone besides ourselves. After about five minutes, we were asked to flip the page back over and spend another few minutes filling the page up with the word "fear." However, this time we were asked to contemplate on seeing that fear as a part of ourselves and to meditate on ways that we might bring healing or positive change to those parts of ourselves. Once again, we were asked to flip the page back over and freewrite. Here is the other side of mine, as an example of what you might expect (sorry if the quality is too poor to read):

This kind of meditation, for personal insight, has been called the backward step by some Zen writers. It is a moment in which we slow down in life, sit, and listen for whatever is present, both internally and externally. However, these Zen writers have also acknowledged that life seems to be a rhythm of forward and backward steps, alternating between periods of action and periods of reflection.

These are supposed to be stick figures holding hands to symbolize a united world.

By teaching students to reflect on themselves and their own actions, we are also teaching them how to reflect on others in the same manner. In the vocabulary of Zen, when we teach our students to be present with themselves, we are also teaching them to be present with others. By examining their own reactions, whether they be towards fear, social issues, or whatever, we are also teaching our students how to anticipate the reactions of their audience. Perhaps it may also help students to realize that their audience is made up of real people. Either way, this kind of presence is deeply needed in composition classrooms today by both teachers and students.